Frederic Bastiat
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men, they create for
themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorises it, and a moral
code that glorifies it.”
Thus quoth Frédéric
Bastiat
Tax Farming ex
Wiki
QUOTE
Tax farming was originally a
Roman practice whereby the burden of
tax collection was reassigned by the Roman State to private individuals
or groups. In essence, these individuals or groups paid the taxes for a
certain area and for a certain period of time and then attempted to cover
their outlay by collecting money or salable goods from the people within
that area. The system was set up by
Gaius Gracchus in
123 BC
primarily to increase the efficiency of tax collection within
Rome itself but
the system quickly spread to the
Provinces.
Within the Roman Empire, these private
individuals and groups that collected taxes in lieu of the bid they had paid
to the state were known as
publicani, of whom the best known is probably
St. Matthew, a publicanus in the village of
Capernaum
in the province of
Galilee.
The system was widely abused, and reforms were enacted by
Augustus
and
Diocletian. Tax farming practices are believed to have contributed to
the
fall of the Roman empire.
Tax farming is not identical with
privatized tax collection, where private individuals or groups collected
taxes and give them to the state in return for a fee. Tax farming is
speculative, meaning that the private individual or group must invest
their own money initially to pay off the tax debt, against the hope of
collecting a larger sum subsequently (hence "farming").
UNQUOTE
The
Wiki can be a splendid source of honest information. This not their best
article. Hiding the truth behind plausible generalities is a technique of the
first class liar rather than the mere amateur.
Tax Farming ex Source Watch
QUOTE
"Tax farming occurred in
Egypt, Rome, Great Britain, and Greece. The principle was considered very
effective for tax revenue collection but suffered from a tendency of the
tax-farmers to abuse the taxpayer for collection. Only when the system
included checks and balances for the tax-farmer as well as the taxpayer did
the system seem truly successful. The publicani of Rome were known as
some of the most abusive tax-farmers. Tax farmers bid at auction for the
contract rights to collect a particular tax and was held responsible for any
loss. In Egypt taxes for collected very effectively without tax farmers
until the Greek Ptolemies set up rule. Under the Ptolemies the tax-farmer
watched over the taxpayer and the government tax collector to prevent the
scribes from imposing lighter taxes on the poor and unfortunate."
UNQUOTE
This reads as more honest than the Wiki.
Tax Slaves Existing for Government
Paul
Craig Roberts explains all. He was in government and finance. He knows,
believe him.
QUOTE
Alan Keyes, a candidate for the Republican 2000 presidential
nomination, argues that the income tax is a slave tax and that Americans
are slaves. He is correct.
A slave is a person who does not own his own labor. After tax,
successful Americans retain no more of the income they produce than 19th
century slaves — and considerably less than medieval serfs.
The maximum that could be extracted from a medieval serf was
one-third — an amount extracted today by the combination of the payroll
tax and the bottom rung of the federal income tax. Add in state sales
and income taxes, and it is apparent that Americans are not a proud,
free people.
Our Founding Fathers knew that an income tax was a slave tax, and
they forbade it. It required a constitutional amendment — the 16th — to
make us slaves.
Republicans permitted the constitutional amendment to go forward
because they believed most of the states would vote it down. The states
did not vote it down, as few of the states had people with incomes high
enough to be subject to the tax.
The tax seemed tailored to hit a few wealthy northeastern states —
the very states that people blamed for high tariffs.
This bit of “getting even” backfired, as it wasn’t long before the
income thresholds were lowered and the tax rates raised. The income tax
net was refashioned to catch us all.
An income tax is different from other taxes. An income tax gives
government a claim to your labor, just as a slave owner had a claim to
the slave’s labor.
A slave who withheld his labor was likely to be punished. He would be
put on short rations or whipped. If one of us today withholds from the
IRS, the punishment is more severe — several years in prison.
The slave tax is very expensive in other ways. It takes 6.1 billion
hours — more than 3 million man-years — to comply with the slave tax. In
dollar terms, it costs us slaves an additional $200 billion to comply
with a 2,840-page tax code — more than twice the number of pages as the
Bible and more than three times the words.
The federal tax rules interpreting the code come to 46,000 pages.
The complexity is so great that it is easy to make a mistake and be
subjected to “enforcement action.” There are 481 separate IRS tax forms
for 1999, an increase of 20 percent from 1990. Last year, the IRS
received 110 million telephone calls asking for help in understanding
the rules. The IRS did not know the answer 27 percent of the time.
Consequently, more than half of us tax slaves hire experts to prepare
our slave-tax returns.
The Joint Economic Committee of Congress, chaired by Sen. Connie
Mack, R-Fla., has prepared a “Tax Complexity Factbook.” It is available
online at www.jec.senate.gov.
You might say that we Americans are nothing like slaves and that
nothing happens to us as long as we do our duty and pay our taxes.
The same thing can be said about 19th century slaves. As long as they
worked at a reasonable pace, they had room and board and clothes on
their backs.
Judging from the number of IRS enforcement actions, a larger
proportion of tax slaves get in trouble today than in the 19th century.
At least a 19th century slave could run away, but where can we go?
UNQUOTE
Doctor
Paul Craig Roberts tells it like it is.
